An Ending

It is probably age and also, perhaps, the spirit of the times, but I have a strong urge to write my story, to say, “Look at me!  Listen to me!  I don’t want my story to just disappear.”  I keep coming back here and trying to reboot my blogging habit, and then I find that it has been a year since my last effort.  Probably the main difficulty for me in keeping up my blog is that I write to a number of friends; my letters to them are as long as my blogs tend to be or longer, so these letters absorb most of my impulse to write.  I lived much of my life far from my hometown to which I returned as retirement loomed, so all my friends live far from me; I love them and do not wish our friendship to lapse.  A friendship where little effort is made to communicate regularly becomes a memory, not a friendship. Correspondence for me fails to provide two things I really miss, stories from the past and the anonymity that my blog provides where I can feel comfortable describing people and events as honestly and freely as I remember them.  I very much want to tell my story fully and exactly as I recall things.  I do not like arguments and I do not like hurting people’s feelings.  One of the most amazing things I have learned from blogging and reading comments is how different what I have written is from what readers have read.  People have sometimes attributed completely different emotions and viewpoints to some topics from what I meant to express.  So I try to avoid many topics in letters to friends because my memories or viewpoint differ from theirs, or are things in which they have no interest because they don’t know the events I would be discussing.

I suppose the above may imply that the headline of this entry refers to me ceasing my blogging, but that is not the case.  I love writing this despite the obvious fact that I rarely do so.  I continue to hope that I will bestir myself to blog more frequently.  Alas, the headline refers to time spent with the man I love, Priyo. 

In the last few years, I have spent many months each year living with Priyo in Gupapur, the capital and only large city of Trinamapur where he now is stationed.  He is still the great guy I fell for, but each year when I visit he has less time when he is not working or taking care of family obligations.  During my last visit prior to this year we usually found time to visit some local state park or lake or some other place to enjoy together once a week.  This year, we managed to find this time together only once per month on average.  Priyo’s job requires him to be on the job six days a week.  He sometimes had to stay there as many as twelve hours in a day.  On many of his days off, he had some family obligation to which he had to attend.  I used to go with him when he went home to his family compound in a tiny village to the south, but I do so much less now because when I am there I am in the home of his parents and his brother’s family and none of them speak English.  His dad has a small knowledge of English, but not enough to have any conversation beyond, “How are you?”  As Priyo goes about doing all the tasks he went there to do, I am stuck in the home of people I can not talk to.  I am never sure I am behaving in a way that meets local standards of courtesy.

Roughly two years ago, my personality or mind or whatever it is began to change radically.  I stopped looking forward to new experiences that involved uncertainty.  My taste in books and movies changed.  One of the most surprising changes is that stumbling through conversations in distant lands with people who spoke minimal English or with whom I had to speak in my far from fluent Arabic no longer entertained me.  I let my hair go white - it is astonishing how differently I am seen with white hair than I was with my poorly colored hair of a few years ago.  I have become increasingly unable to deal with strange food - I loathe the local cuisine in the Northeast States of India.  I dread the inevitable meal I will encounter when I visit someone’s home there.  I made several friends when I first visited Trinamapur, but I just lost interest in meeting new people.  These changes surprised me, but they were real and permanent.  One result is that I spent nearly all of my last visit to Priyo alone in our apartment with unreliable electricity, internet and water supply.  I realized I just do not wish to spend this kind of time for months at a time, even though I love Priyo and love being with him.  So even before the coronavirus struck, I knew this was my last visit.  An even more powerful reason that I cannot return is that Priyo has finally succumbed to the unceasing pressure from everyone in his family, social circle and even from casual strangers, to marry.  Because of his job, he must remain in his remote state, so he does not have the anonymity that he might find in Delhi or Mumbai.  Living there, he really can not look forward to a satisfying life if he does not conform to the social norms.  Even if I loved living in Trinamapur, I cannot provide a happy future for Priyo because I will be gone long before he is.  The free health care in India does not extend to foreigners like me.  Priyo insists that his marriage will not cut into our time together, but I have lived long enough to know that is never true.  The travel to and from Trinamapur becomes ever more stressful.  The upshot is that Priyo is now married and I will not be returning to India. 

We love each other; we talk nearly every day.  Happily, he seems to have picked the best possible wife and I think, over time he will become content, especially if there are children as he hopes.  I can already see signs that he is accepting his fate and is becoming more contented.  He continues to insist he loves me and that he thinks of me all the time and I believe this, but I can sense that new obligations are beginning to take more of his thoughts. 

So I am back on the scrap heap that is old age.  I regret nothing; I had an amazing six years with him that I never dreamed would come to me at the age of 71.  Few people get that so late in life, and I am grateful for all of it.   And now, what?

1970

I was drinking coffee here in India this morning, and dipping into various random Youtube videos and something I saw, which I have forgotten already, made me suddenly ask myself what I was doing in 1970.  I have missed writing on this blog and yet it is only my utter inertia that has kept me from doing so.  So I thought that if I wrote down the year “1970”, I would just see where that led me.  I have found that if i can make myself write just one sentence, I am off and running and can hardly stop writing thereafter.  My personal letters have been known to run to ten pages which I often write in a single sitting without stopping for anything.  I forget that I am writing and it feels to me like I am having a conversation.  My block, if I can call it that, comes before that first sentence is put down.  Give me any sentence and i can go on from there for a long time.  So, having written “1970” this is where I went.

When the year 1970 began, I was 27 years old and just finishing the best and worst decade of my life.  I suppose that there are many people like me who feel that their 20s are the equivalent of living through a ten-year earthquake.  Ten years before the morning, of January 1, 1970, I was in my senior year of high school; I had never been outside the State of New York.  I had rarely been outside the three-county area I was born in and the primary reason I had even been as far as the other two counties which were nearest to the one I lived in is because Reedville is in the very southeast corner of Maycomb County, which meant then that the closest shopping areas lay in another county rather than in Maycomb, even though a rather large city inside Maycomb was just 15 miles to the north of my home.  As viewed by me, the 17 years since my birth had been, for America, one long upward curve of prosperity, enlightenment and scientific advance.  We had won the war that America had entered just before my birth, in which it was quite clear to me was one where we did no wrong and the enemy had been unrelievedly evil.  There were people, people I knew, who bought a new model car every year or two, and those cars grew steadily more beautiful, more reliable and just plain better each year.  The school district in which I lived had built one of the most modern and well-equipped K-12 buildings in the state, to which students were transferred from a number of small local buildings scattered across the two towns, Reedville and Charlotte, that it served, when I was in fourth grade.  College, even though neither of my parents had attended one, was the inevitable and unquestioned next step for me.  Nearly all the families I knew had a working father and an at-home mother, and the father’s income allowed the family to have a made-for-TV life - maybe a cottage at the lake (or at least a two-week rental of one for summer vacation), a late model car, a nice. well-equipped home.  Families wherein a divorce had occurred, or where there was only one parent present in the home were rare and an object of curiosity to me.  My entire school district covering two townships, as I said, had had exactly two Black students during the whole of my twelve years, each of whom attended for a single year several years apart from each other.  A single Asian family - Chinese - appeared during the last few years: a girl and her younger brother, some years behind me.  Diversity (a term I never heard) was represented by the Italians who had begun moving into the district during the 50s when Charlotte became ‘suburban’, and who were resented quite a bit by some - more by parents than by their fellow students.  There were, I now know, Jewish students, but I had no idea of this when I was in school, I thought they were German if I thought about them at all, and I thought this because their surnames tended to sound German. 

On a more personal level, my family had gotten indoor plumbing.  We were behind the curve in this but, as I say, the trend was ever upward toward better, toward the Dream.  We were, in fact, poor, but we owned our farm and had lots of buildings and acres of safe space to play in.  Although there were spots in some rooms of our home where plaster had fallen out, holes worn in the carpets in places, and bread and milk or bread and Campbell tomato soup suppers on occasion, I didn’t feel underprivileged or poor like the boys I read about in the books of Horatio Alger, or the “starving children in Europe” that I was reminded of when I didn’t want to eat what was on my plate.  Yes, the starving children were in Europe during my early childhood, not in Bangladesh or Africa or other more modern famine areas.  I once told a couple of English programmers who were my age that I worked with much later that I hoped they appreciated all the awful stuff I choked down on their behalf.  One turned to the other and asked, “Do you remember ever having enough to eat back then?”  Insofar as I thought about my life in relation to the amount of money available, I had the vague idea that all the families I knew were about the same; we just had more kids, so what we had had to be stretched further than in all those two-child families around us. 

The personal secret that I bore, and was vaguely aware of before first grade and acutely aware of after sixth grade, was that in my innermost and most deeply hidden self I was not like the boys round me.  It started out by me liking different toys than the others, enjoying the company of my sister and female cousins more than that of the boys, of not wanting to hang around adult males, whom I found intimidating and judgmental, and whose lives seemed to me to be hard, grey and bleak.  Girls and women, I thought, got all the fun and easy stuff.  Yes, I know now that the reverse is more true than not, but this was my view then.  But no one ever seemed to suspect this difference in me and my life up until, and into, the sixties seemed normal, looked normal, and was, as a whole as normal as any.  I was not threatened by anyone, although at times I felt bereft of the kind of friendships and attractions I saw around me. 

Nonetheless, up to this day, when anyone mentions childhood or high school or the like, my first thought is of sunny days, songs I loved, fun I had, friends I loved, a loving family, the farm I loved with all my heart, an optimism about the future.  When, during this period, I read history - assassinations, pogroms, slavery, oppression - I took for granted that was all over and finished, hunger was being dealt with, disease was being cured.  Now we were progressive, kind-hearted, intrinsically better than all that.  Whether or not I experienced inner glitches from time to time, the world was OK, it was a good place, I was born in the best of times.  Although I occasionally experienced times of very black depressions I kept these to myself, and once such a spell was past I thought of it as an incident, almost trivial, and now over with, even though it happened again and again.  As long as there were people around me - and with seven brothers and a sister and the neighbor kids preferring to come play at our house, there usually were people around, I was just fine.  The thing that people who do not experience depression - clinical depression, not the one-off periods that result from a true demonstrable hurt: a death, an illness, a disappointment; the thing that these people do not understand is that the man or woman they know that is laughing and dancing and joking around nearly every time they see him or her is a real person, but the unseen and hidden despondent person is just as real.  This person is not ‘faking it’, he really is both people and the two are equally genuine.  I could write a history of my childhood that would sound as if I had one of the hardest and most painful lives ever, and every word would be true, but equally, I could write a tale of that same life that would sound as though I were the happiest, luckiest man ever born.  My first instinct, when recalling those days, is the latter.

As the decade between Jan 1960 and January 1970 progressed, I became more my ‘real’ adult self, and the journey led me through high school graduation; college and dropping out thereof after five semesters; hitchhiking across the USA and back; my first 40-hour-a-week ‘real job’, my first alcoholic drink; my move from New York to California where I would live for much of my life; my beach days as a wannabe surfer; increasing depression leading to an eleven-moth sojourn in a mental hospital; first telling tsomeone that I was gay; training for and beginning the profession in which I would spend my working life - data processing; the assassinations and upheavals of the 1960s that proved to me that history was not an unbroken progress toward perfection; being drafted and being rejected for service; voting in 1964 for Goldwater and in 1968 for McGovern; moving to San Francisco just at the end of the Summer of Love; telling my first family member that I was gay; the complete and utter loss of my faith not only in Catholicism in which I was raised and in which I which I believed deeply and fervently, but also in any religious ‘truth’ whatever; the death of my youngest brother; and the meeting, falling in love with and moving in with the great love of my life, Tumwell , just six months before the decade ended.  I began the 60s with a feeling of security and continuity and the feeling that although I was different (which I saw as defective) that I could handle this defect and live as if it didn’t exist; but I began the 70s with a feeling of complete uncertainty as to what was good, what was true and what the future held.

Self-examination - And Not the Checking for Lumps Kind

I actually love writing once I start doing it.  It is really a mystery to me why I do not post more often.  But this is another aspect of a characteristic that has been mine for a lifetime: the inexplicable reluctance to begin an activity that I know I will enjoy.  

If I rise to find the day sunny and warm and beautiful, there is an even chance that I will not get myself outdoors for the entire day.  I like gardening; I may have a bag of bulbs or a flat of seedlings or a new lawn mower, but never once in my entire life have I run out eagerly to get started.  I will buy things I have wanted ever since they were invented and a month later the package will remain unopened.  I ordered a big pile of mulch in May and 3/4 of it is still sitting in my driveway as I write in October.  I could see myself winning the lottery and putting off picking up the winnings day after day.  If a friend shows up at my door, I feel unalloyed pleasure and off I go to do whatever, but if I have planned to do the same exact thing with the same exact friend, I will regret the necessity to go through with it more with each minute as the time to meet approaches.  If I have even the whisper of a deadline, I am almost paralyzed.

When I do not run out into the day, or meet my friend, or open the package, in what wondrous and desirable activity will I engage instead?  Mostly moping about how dull my life is, and trying to find something to read, or watching something on the internet that barely holds my interest and which I will forget almost before it is finished.  

I have sometimes put off a chore that really needs to be completed for days or weeks only to find once I finally force myself to do it, that it takes almost no time and very little effort at all.  I know beforehand I will feel really good when it gets done, and yet, next time around it will be just as hard to get to it as every time before.  

What IS this way of living?  I look at others living with problems like a window that needs fixing and think, “Why don’t you do this or that and get it over with?” and yet I behave with the exact same amount of inertia myself.  The best I can come up with is that I must have some deep fear of disappointment.  If I open that package, the item inside will not work, or it will be harder to use than I expected or I won’t be happy with the results or some other disappointment will ensue.  If I try to fix something, I will make it worse.  I can imagine that I will be perfect at all the things I have never actually tried; but once I try things I am not naturally superb on the first try.  And then it comes to practicing or trying again or whatever and the now diminished expectations make practice and trying and working on things unrewarding.  The dream lasts until I wake up and actually get going.  

So, speaking of deadlines, two days after the Election I have my ticket to fly to India for my annual five month stay with P.  Winter is coming, so before I go I must prepare gardens for winter, bring inside my clothes poles and garden decor and picnic table and store my kayak (used once since my eager purchase of same) and my lawn mower and such things, and purchase and pack things needed for my trip.  Needless to say, it is not going well…  

Calling the Internet...

I woke this morning to find that I was completely unable to get onto the internet.  I am one who tends to find myself faced with two choices in such situations: 1) pause for a moment of rational thought and search for the likely cause before acting, and 2) fly into a rage and start hammering on any keyboard or accessory, cursing a) Apple, b) Spectrum (although I usually forget and curse Time-Warner first), c) Netgear, which is the maker of the router I have currently installed and d) the Universe for singling me out for special attention.  One result of my inevitable choice of option 2, is that I start trying all the simplest actions first, re-trying everything three times, turning various apps or devices off and on again and the like, logging off and back on.  The last thing I ever want to do is actually begin contacting the suppliers of the elements of the internet in my supply chain - said Apple, Spectrum, Netgear and any other corporations I can think of.  Why so reluctant?  Well, the 45 minute holds; the Muzak I must sit through; the press 1 for an option I don’t want, press 2 for an option I want even less and so forth until I reach the wait for the next available agent/associate/servant of god default; then “we are having an unusual volume of calls so your wait may be longer than usual” (Has it ever not been?); “your call is important to us so please stay on the line”; “you may be able to solve your issue by going to our website” (which is just the thing I can’t do and is why I am on the line in the first place).  All of these might be some of the reasons why I don’t do the corporation contacting in the first place, which would be sensible enough if I didn’t know that inevitably I will have to make these calls eventually to actually solve the problem.  This call will be rendered even more painful and heartbreaking since all my knee-jerk turnings off and on will have made it necessary to restore a shitload of connections for which I will need to remember passwords established years ago and long-since forgotten.  Occasionally I will reach a point where I must answer some security questions.  I am OK with these when they happen to be favorite teacher, father’s middle name or mother’s maiden name.  But often they only present options that never happened in my life.  Today Netgear wanted to know the name of the first Netgear product I ever used.  Do people actually keep track of shit like this?  I don’t even know the name of the current Netgear product I am using. 

Once I had ruined every connection I have ever set up, I realized the fact that my telephone land line was also not working took the onus off Netgear and Apple and the Universe and placed it squarely on Spectrum because they are the people who supply me with both internet and land line phone.  So I needed to call Spectrum first.  Without internet, however, how was I to find their telephone number?  I dread calling from my cellphone because I live in a shady dell that somehow makes cellular service very unreliable and calls tend to be slightly less clear than they were on that string and two cans I used in the 1950s.  The person at the other end of my call will keep telling me that I am cutting in and out or some such thing, and if I drive to a nearby hilltop to call, I will not have with me any of the vast list of numbers, passwords, username, dates, historical data, and verses from the Bible that I will be asked to supply in a tone that implies that every other human on Earth has these items lodged firmly in his or her active short term memory.  And I realized that I had cancelled my cable this month and retained only the land-line and internet services, but I have not yet turned in my cable box (no one ever told me I needed to, but duh…) and I was busy girding my loins for an epic battle in case the change in service and retention of my cable box was going to be an issue in getting my service back.  When I finally was fully prepared for battle, I finally searched around a mostly unused desk in a rarely entered room where my cable wires come into the house and there found a piece of paper with the old Time Warner contact number which, when I tried it, actually worked.  The long recorded message (after pressing 1 for English and clearly stating my problem for the computer at the other end so that it might direct me to the correct follow-up pre-recorded message) informed me that the service in a large area was currently down and that I could request that the company call me when it is back up.  This message took longer than necessary, of course, because I had to listen to all the sorrow and self-loathing on my behalf that this outage had caused the company which, one gathers, has caused them to take even longer to return to service since workers must do their jobs while fighting back tears. 

I just hung up, but now I am thinking I must go through all the recordings again because I did not select the option to be called when service is restored.  That gives me something to do with the second half of my day.  That and undoing all the messing around with links and devices that I surely bollixed up before I finally called.  Life is good.

Aretha, Al and The Log

When I got out of the Nut House, the State of California, in its infinite wisdom, paid for my training as a computer programmer at a commercial training institution in San Francisco.  I was also given a stipend of $132 per month for the duration of my training which lasted, I believe, eight months.  I knew nothing of San Francisco, but was advised that there were establishments, known as residence clubs, where one could pay a relatively small rent entitling one to not only a a room or a bed in a shared room, but also to two meals per day, breakfast and supper, in a large dining room.  (On Sundays, alas, one got only breakfast, making it quite a stretch to feed oneself with the funds available.)

I found a shared room in the Kenmore, which is still a residence club 50 years later, sitting in a sort-of-grandish building on Sutter street between Gough and Octavia.  My rent for a month in a room with its own toilet (but with the bathing facility down the hall and shared by many), a room with not one, but two other occupied beds, was $125.  On a whim I just looked up the rent nowadays, (for yes! The Kenmore survives!) and it is now $1280. For those among you who are not math whizzes, I will do the computation for you: the monthly rent at the Kenmore left me a total of $7 for spending money each month.  I was told this had been added on to the stipend for the rent in order to pay for my transportation to and from school.  I was rolling in dough!

My two roomies already were in residence.  One was Jimmy, a smallish slim guy with curly brown hair who thought it hard to imagine why Elvis had never received an Academy Award and the other, Cliff, was a much larger guy who vaguely resembled the actor Jon Hamm, with facial features a bit more weighted in the direction of average than those of the glamorous Mr. Hamm.  Jimmy was pleasant enough, although we never became any closer than two guys forced to share a room, while Cliff was just sort of there.  Jimmy soon moved out, but not before I entered the room one day, apparently unexpectedly, to discover him performing oral sex on one of the men who worked as a waiter in the dining hall.  I had lived a more sheltered life than I thought up until then and had never developed a set of manners for such an occasion.  I backed rapidly out the room and came back sometime later that day.  Jimmy and I acted as if nothing untoward had happened.  

Cliff and I virtually never spoke; I never saw him speak to anyone except his father who showed up one day.  Even with his Dad he said little.  And then one day, after Cliff and I were left as the only two occupants of our very quiet room, he suddenly asked me if I’d like to get something to drink.  I was so eager to have some degree of communication with him that I said, “Sure,” and we proceeded to go to a nearby liquor store and to purchase a pint of rum.  We said nothing on the walk to and from the store.  Back in the room we proceeded to drink the rum together without exchanging more than a word or two.  I am not sure how I found out, but it turned out that Cliff, like me, had come to the Kenmore directly from a mental hospital and was, I think, also having a vocational course paid for by the state.  The combination of the low rates and the certainty of at least two meals per day made these clubs attractive as a sort of halfway house. I flatter myself that I had come out of my stay on the Funny Farm with a bit more going for me than Cliff.  He had a small voice recorder about the size of a Sony Walkman, although Walkmen (Walkmans?) were not yet on the market.  Every so often he would record a verbal note to do something or other: “Pick up the laundry.”  “Buy some cookies.”  To my complete shock, I discovered that Cliff had a girlfriend much in the same way I discovered that Jimmy was, um, friends with the waiter from downstairs.  Life at the Kenmore was certainly a worldly experience.  I came back to the room one day to find Cliff and a woman lying in each others’ arms under a blanket on his bed.  They were fully dressed, however.  I said nothing, but had nowhere to go, so I just lay down in my bed and turned away.  They said almost nothing to each other and hardly moved from the position in which I had discovered them and eventually they got up and left.  Nobody (other than me) seemed at all embarrassed.  He told me that she was his girlfriend upon his return.  

I cannot fathom what “girlfriend” meant to him, however, since he knew less about boys and girls together than even little virgin me, as I was to discover.  Apparently knowing anything was a bit of a struggle for Cliff.  He was in the process of learning how to become a time clock repairman.  He had a model on his desk to work on.  One day he was facing an exam, I gather, because he suddenly asked me to check a paper with text on it while he attempted to check his memory of the contents.  It hardly sounds believable even to me, but the sole contents of that paper were a list of the twelve months numbered from one to twelve.  He began to recite this, “One is January; two is  - um - February, three is, is, is March…”  He was having real difficulty with this!  

I soon established friendly relations with a few other residents of the Kenmore.  One was a student from Japan studying at a local college.  He was a very slight and slim guy, very soft spoken, who practiced akido.  It must have done wonders for him; he rented a room which did not have its own bath and one day when he was walking down the hall in his robe I saw that he had the calves of Hercules.  

Another resident with whom I became friendly was a half-Burmese man named Al Braithwaite.  Al looked like someone from India.  He was brown-skinned and taller than me with an athletic build and slightly wavy black hair.  His Mom was of Burmese nationality and his Dad British.  It was a mystery to me why he looked neither Burmese nor European, although he spoke with an English accent.  I liked Al very much.  He had a great sense of fun and we did a number of things together.  He worked at the Lucky Lager Brewery which entitled him to a certain amount of free beer each week or month; I forget which.  What was not to like?  One day, I discovered him in tears.  He apparently had been unable to pay his rent for the single private room he was occupying and the woman who managed the club had apparently spoken in a way to him that caused him great shame.  I think that what passed between them had felt more shameful to him than it might have been to an American.  He did have enough money to take over the bed that Jimmy had vacated, and I suggested that he do just that.  It was nice to have someone in the room with whom I could have a normal conversation.  We more or less talked around Cliff when he was present, since he rarely said anything or even acknowledged we were in the room.

The following sounds like a joke, but I swear it is exactly what happened.  One day Al and I were chatting away about our lives and he recounted some youthful misadventure with a girl.  Suddenly Cliff spoke up with a gem of his own.  

“In high school,” he began, “We had sex education classes …”  This sounded promising; at last a three-way chat in the room.  

“They told us that a boy puts his dick inside the girl and that’s how babies are made.”  

“Yes, yes,” thought Al and I.  “And?”

“But that is now how it happens at all,” said Cliff.  

The room got very quiet.  Al and I exchanged some of the most uncomfortable looks I have ever shared in my life.  It is hard to describe, but I had such a feeling of shifting out of reality and into somehow dangerous mental territory.  The method for impregnation Cliff then outlined involved a funnel and a length of rubber hose.  When he finished, Al and I said nothing; we just sat there kind of in shock.  This was a man in his twenties; one that claimed to have a girlfriend whom I had actually seen.  How was it even possible that he would say something like this?  There was no more conversation in the room that evening.  

On an evening when Al and I had consumed more beverages than was wise, we found ourselves - just the two of us - in our room in the evening and we picked up Cliff’s recorder and started recording whatever came to our heads.  I recall Al saying that Cliff just lies there like a log, and from that point on, we never called Cliff anything other than “The Log” when we referred to him.  We realized the next day that we had not erased our remarks and we shook in our boots a bit, but nothing was ever said.  

One cold and grey day, Al and I took the Geary bus to Ocean Beach and walked around out there just for something to do.  While there we clambered across some rocks close to the water and a sudden wave, larger than the rest, completely soaked me.  It was a cold day and I was soon shivering; we had to wait for the bus to return and by the time I actually was able to take a warm shower, I was in such a hurry to do so and to get warm that I dashed into our toilet room, tore off my soaked clothes and dropped them where I stood, wrapped a towel around myself and went off to the shower down the hall.  I was just finishing when The Log burst into the shower room and said that the manager wanted to see me in our room.  I said I would be there in a minute and he said, “Now!” and I realized he was practically shaking with rage.  It turned out that he had returned to find my wet clothing on the bathroom floor and had called the manager.  He was in the right in that I should not have left my wet things on the floor, but I would certainly have picked them up when I was warmed from my shower.  The manager was not at all understanding nor pleasant; pleasantness did not seem to be in her job description, nor in her personal arsenal.  From that point on, I was a bit afraid of The Log (OK, a lot afraid; he had been enraged beyond all reason) and very soon Al and I moved into a different residence club just down the street.

This new club was still on Sutter Street on the corner of Gough and, on the corner across Gough was a neighborhood bar where Al and I used to go when we had some funds to spare.  This bar had on its jukebox, Respect and Chain of Fools by Aretha Franklin.  Al loved these songs, and I liked them also, and they got quite a lot of play between us and the other patrons.  These are the only songs I can recall on that jukebox.  When I heard of the death of Aretha yesterday, some of my first thoughts were of listening to these two songs with Al in that bar.  

Each person has his or her own memories of first hearing those singers who were icons of our generation.  Most, I suspect, are as personal and trivial as my own, but taken together, they form a huge shared experience of a time and of a great performer.  I was not a such a devoted fan of Aretha as many were, but I liked her music and I loved some songs such as these two; and part of the good feeling of life, part of my life’s soundtrack, include these and a handful of other songs by Aretha.  She was with us when we partied, or drove our cars, or sat at home alone and with friends; she was there when we felt sad or happy or in between.  And now she is gone and a little of the warmth has gone from our generation’s memories.  

When I finished my schooling, I moved back to the South Bay Area near L. A. for a few months and Al and I lost touch.  He had left the second residence club before I did, to take an apartment because he had met a girl he liked.  We saw a bit of each other up until I left town, but we were on divergent paths and I rarely think of him except when I hear one of Aretha’s first two hits.  This is one of the great gifts that come with music; a song you really like nearly always puts you for a brief moment right back into the circumstances and with the people you knew when the song first came to your notice.

A not so smart TV and (of course) more Priyo

Christmas came and went and, because I sent cards this year, and sent them a couple of weeks early, I got more cards than usual.  I also got something I really wanted and most definitely didn’t need, but it was a perfect gift choice because it came from me.  I have had a TV-viewing set up for several years which consisted of my TV hooked up to an Apple Mini computer through which I did all my viewing by streaming the shows I liked via file-sharing sites.  This enabled me to get rid of cable (I will NOT pay to watch ten or more minutes of ads every half hour!)  It also allowed me to watch series from other English-speaking countries - Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia and Britain all have some great shows.  But it was a clumsy set up - lots of wires because I also needed to attach a wi-fi receiver to catch the signal from my router upstairs and I needed a wireless keyboard and mouse.  I asked around about “smart” TVs and was informed that I could browse the web using only the TV itself - the internet access was built in.  I looked at Consumer Reports and their “best buy” was a Samsung, which was about a thousand dollars less than all the other brands rated as highly.  I went to the store and for the first time ever in my history with this store I got some incorrect info from a clerk who was, I assume, a temporary Christmas hire.   Consumer Reports was pretty happy with all the rated aspects of this TV - picture quality and every measure thereof. 

So I happily made my purchase.  The delivery/set up men were great.  The picture was everything CR had promised.  I got even more local antenna channels than I had with the old set (I DO watch a half hour of news each night, gritting my teeth through the ads).  So there I sat in bliss watching a much larger, much better picture - so clear and bright that I almost didn’t notice that most of what I was watching was ads.  I gave my old set-up - TV, wifi receiver, Apple Mini and the lot - to my favorite nephew Sebastian, who was delighted to receive them.  Sebastian is acquiring the necessities for setting up house; he is looking to buy his first house and get out of the family domicile where his mother and older brother are driving him slowly nuts.  After a day or so, during which Sebastian took off for Pennsylvania to spend a late Christmas with his sister and father and their entourages, I began to seriously learn the pleasures of surfing the net with my new smart web browser. 

I found the navigation quite difficult because, of course, searches required using a pop-up keyboard displayed on the screen and scrolling was only possible by repeated use of the up/down/left/right arrow and select buttons on the remote.  This wasn’t wholly surprising, although I did seem to have more difficulty than could be explained solely by the clumsy remote requirements.  Often searches didn’t seem to take, and often I couldn’t get to the content I wanted because ad screens kept popping up.  I figured a keyboard would solve most of the problems - with the faster, easier data entry and a built in trackpad for scrolling, I would find it far easier to solve any other problems and learn the vagaries of this set.  I got a Samsung keyboard specifically designed for smart TV web browsing.

I soon discovered that my initial impression that I couldn’t get anything done was the correct one.  Having the faster text entry via keyboard just meant failing to achieve my object more quickly and more frequently within a given period of time.  The set has a built in web browser based on the ubuntu type language (I know; I never heard of it either!) which is absolutely worthless.  It will not permit adding ad blocking apps.  It will also not permit downloading a better browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox) which do allow ad blocking and blacklisting of risky sites.  Sebastian offered to return my Mini (an offer which I shame-facedly accepted) but he is still disporting himself in the fleshpots of southern Pennsylvania for another day or two.  Several links are built into the Samsung browser (when I went on a website that evaluates and tells you which browser you are currently using, it told me I was using “Samsung Browser 1”, which I will abbreviate as SB1).  These links are for popular sites - mostly pay sites like VUDU, HBO, Netflix - but one link is for Youtube.  I decided, pending Sebastian’s gracious return of my computer, to content myself with watching some Youtube fare.  But I discovered that the way the browser from Hell displayed these sites was different from all others, which I have previously found always to be identically displayed on every browser I have used before now - Microsoft’s IE, Apple’s Safari, Chrome, Firefox.   SB1’s format showed less variety of suggestions in the first screen as well as fewer links, and it was next to impossible to get beyond those few choices.  Screens - both the selction screens and those within the Youtube videos themselves, seemed to be larger than the display area - so that there were overflow bits (tops of heads and so forth) not visible.  The picture sizing keys, netted me a pop up that said ‘not available’.  Pressing the select key often started a video entirely different from that which I thought I had chosen.  My home page, which is Yahoo, also was displayed differently and in a way that required scrolling to see headlines of articles - I could only see one at a time.

When I first enter the browser it shows an initial screen of ‘Featured’ links (read “paid for”).  One of these is Google.  When I click on the Google link, the words ‘google.com’ appear in the URL bar; there is a long wait and then a screen displays that says this website is not available.  When I clear this and actually type in ‘www.google.com”, and enter it, it reverts to ‘google.com’ and I get the same result; not always but for about three out of four tries. 

As a side observation there were two problems with the keyboard setup in itself.  First, the keyboard was defective and transposed the values for double quote and ‘@‘.  Imagine having to remember to press shift-quote when you wanted to enter a URL name with the ever-needed ‘@‘.  Secondly (and I later saw this mentioned in a how-to video for setting up a keyboard with the Samsung), the bluetooth receptor is behind the screen which causes enough interference so that in using the trackpad, the scrolling function is jittery and often stops for a bit before you reach the position to which you are scrolling. 

Internet rumors also have it that Samsung not only does not allow ad blocking, but in fact has itself embedded ads in its browser.  I tend to believe it - I cannot get anything done because of the many ad screens that show up when I press ‘play’ on the video I want, on those rare occasions when I can get to said video in the first place. 

I do not know if Samsung is unique in the utter uselessness of its web browser; I suspect not.  I do think Consumer Reports needs to include evaluation on the ’smart’ aspect as well as the ‘TV’ aspect of its evaluation of this type of TV.  I have ended up with a setup that I could have gotten for several hundred dollars less - a big dumb TV being used as a video monitor for my trusty old Apple Mini.  If anyone out there is considering a smart TV, I urge him or her to find one already set up where he can evaluate its usability for any internet related activity by actually trying the functions he plans to use.  There is NOTHING that is reliably doable on the one I have. 

On to happier notes: Priyo’s term at the police academy lasted eleven months; he graduated second in his class, which pissed him off mightily; at half term he had been number one (and, had he remained at that rank, he would have had his picture in the local paper as well as receiving a big trophy for which he had lusted all term).  He is now the equivalent of a state trooper or highway patrolman, rather than a city cop.  In fact he has been to several accidents already, as well as a post mortem.  He has been offered - and refused - his first bribe by a cyclist driving without a license.  He was also involved in a 3 a.m. raid to pick up a wanted man.  I asked him if he scared the family and he told me, “No; they scared us!” 

So many men had been accepted into the academy that they had to divide the class and send the second half for training in Assam.  This latter group will not finish until early February.  Thus, until the twelfth of February, Priyo will be assigned to his local district, south of Imphal, rather than his expected assignment in Senapati north of Gupapur, so that he is working, but not accumulating seniority at his official posting.  They won’t start Priyo’s group earlier than the Assam lot in order to avoid whining down the road about unfair seniority if a promotion is given to one of the earlier finishers.  He has also discovered that until July he will be stationed in Gupapur for on-the-job training in various types of tasks before being located in his officially assigned district of Senapati.  He is currently using his rare days off to find a nice place in Gupapur for us to stay.  He has one possibility in view, though the landlords are strict Hindus and we will not be able to eat beef or pork there.  I asked how they would know, and he said, “By the smell.”  Christians and Muslims are not the only sects to meddle in their neighbors’ business or to be more acutely conscious of others’ diversity than they are of their own virtue (which is generally taken for granted!). 

As hoped now, I will head for Gupapur around Feb 15, give or take.  First I want to be sure there is an apartment WITH WINDOWS.  Priyo and I are as one on the topic of what a cesspit our last place was.  As soon as he gives me the go-ahead date I will look for the earliest flight that is affordable.  I will probably plan to stay until the end of June if it continues to appear that Priyo will be training in Gupapur until July.  It kills me to miss spring here in Reedville, both because it is the garden planting season and because it is so lovely and serene to be here during that time of early blooming, lilacs, and the greening of everything.  Imphal is anything but serene!  But it is clear to me that the length of time that Priyo and I have been apart is detrimental to our happiness.  It is not that we are less committed or care less or anything like that; it is that with him being at the academy and now on a new career, and me being in a land he has never seen, our daily conversations are limited to events past or to describing people and places that one or the other of us have never known, or to news topics when most news is on subjects of which the other has no knowledge.   We both know that there are going to be at least 6 month stretches apart in future, but a year is just too long. 

One of the great problems with dating when one is older is that it is easy to get into the mindset that one has achieved a fairly satisfactory life and that the other person must fit into an established schedule and set of relationships and interests.  Nobody is out there looking to change everything - most are not open to changing anything.  But the fact is that when you are really in love, all those ‘musts’ seem like nothing; the problem is that you fall in love after you meet someone which can be precluded by screening out 'imperfect' choices at the get-go.  Priyo makes me very happy and that is not worth cutting short for a pretty spring or pretty garden alone here in NY.  I hasten to say he could be labelled an imperfect choice only by the fact of our distance from each other.

So we shall see what is next!

Summer's End

Summer this year didn’t really begin until July; June was extremely wet and not all that summery.  And then, to my dismay, it began to feel like autumn very early in August.  By now all the less beautiful autumn trees - ashes, willow, locusts are turning brown and yellow and are dropping leaves.  This summer I purchased a gingko tree and planted it beyond my ponds at a point where there was a visible opening in the surrounding greenery in the view from my window so that I would have a bright bit of color in October.  It was dismaying to find that bright bit of color striking my eye in August. 

As I reported before, I returned earlier than planned from India this year, and that allowed me to enjoy the coldest winter in local history.  There were entire weeks that did not get above 10 degrees in temperature.  Just as things began to let up a little, Mom passed away on Good Friday.  She had been to our Sunday Breakfast up until just a couple of weeks before, but since my return from Trinamapa I had noticed deterioration in her motor skills.  Mom’s decline into dementia has been very slow paced, but years ago she had reached the point where she was no longer the Mom in whom I could confide, or the Mom who could make me laugh - although she remained very funny long after she didn’t know who I was.  I had had such a long period of gradual loss with the attendant grieving, that the actual passing did not seem to induce any strong wave of new grief.  We were called the evening before by the facility she was in and told that she was in her last hours.  So all of us in the area were able to visit and spend time with her, though she was not really aware.  She seemed a little agitated, kept picking at her blanket, but she did not struggle for breath or show any signs of acute distress.  I am glad I got the chance to be there.  I didn’t feel so much loss, as a feeling that there was now nothing between me and my end.  As long as one’s parents live, one feels one has a bit of a reprieve from having to contemplate one’s own end.

Although I did not feel what I recognized as grief, I entered a period of extreme lassitude.   For the first time I didn’t over-extend myself buying plants and fertilizers and the like in spring.  I ate little (just enough ready-made bad foods to keep me unhealthy), and didn’t feel like doing anything.  The Sunday Breakfasts, after something like 30 years, ended abruptly.  These were events by which I tended to mark my week.  They were where we swapped inconsequential news; the daily kind that no one bothers to call someone about.  I felt pretty isolated.  This lasted until mid-July, when I seemed to get a second wind.

Since my return from India, Priyo and I have talked nearly every day.  He is very busy at the police academy where he was, at last ranking, number one in his class.  His endurance runs have gone from 5K to 10K in length.  He has trained in all kinds of things, crime scene protocol, forensics, ballistics, rights of arrestees and so forth.  He is heartily tired of the routine and eager to be out and actually on the job.  A concerning thing for me is that the Kuki tribal people (who originated from an area in Burma) are in a state of insurrection pretty much in the area he will be posted.  They dislike the Meitei who are pretty much the majority group that runs Trinamapa and of which Priyo is a member.  I guess I am destined to have the full experience of one who has a loved one in the police force.  Priyo believes that he will be able to visit NY within months of his POP (passing out parade) which is equivalent to graduation.  He is constantly studying, parading, running endurance and in class, so that we have shorter calls on most days.  This is also because the internet has been abysmal at his end lately (I think; it could be my end or both).  As soon as he starts his first assignment in Senapati, we believe that we will know enough about his future situation to begin planning to meet again.  If he will be living in barracks, I can not, of course, stay with him.  If not, then we can go on as before.  I also think he said something that implied that his time in Senapati will include two-month assignments at varying posts within the district.  Eventually he will be able to seek reassignment to Gupapur or his home district south of Panjang, but the Senapati posting is for two years.  There is no way we can endure being apart that long, so I may have to have him rent me my own apartment near his posting where we can visit together.  We shall see.  There is nothing we can plan until his situation is clear. 

Just before my birthday, I awoke one morning planning to get several errands done early and went out to find my battery completely dead, although I hadn’t left on the lights, nor caught the seatbelt buckle in the door which causes a ‘door open’ beeping that eventually wears down the battery.  I was so irritated that when I finally got the thing started, I went and bought a different car.  It took a couple of weeks to arrive (I use CarMax and the car I chose was in Illinois), but it is here now and I am swanning around in my fourth Miata, this one with a power retractable hardtop.  This has cheered me up immensely.  The nice thing is that the newer model has running lights which turn off automatically (no lights left on accidentally), and not only does the improved seatbelt design not allow the buckle to block the door from completely closing, but even if it did, the car does not beep, so the battery is not worn down. 

I am sorry that I do not have a great deal of wildly amusing events to liven up my writing, but the days, though pleasant enough, are not newsy (thank goodness!).  I have had a spate of new great nephews and nieces born - one three quarters Mexican, one three quarters Native American (in Dubai of all places!), another one quarter Native American and one half Indian (of India) - this last when asked which kind of Indian he is can answer, “Both!” which will no doubt annoy the asker and not be believed. 

When I got my school tax bill this year, I cringed, because it came just when I had to put a big sum down on my new car.  Imagine my surprise and joy when it was only one-third of the amount of prior years!  It turns out that the form that one files in NY each year to obtain the reduction for seniors has a couple of lines that I had previously not paid attention to, and which would have reduced my payments to this smaller sum for years.  I happened to bring my taxes in together with my form for next years reduction, and the Assessor himself was there and pointed out how to maintain this lower assessment.  Yippee-ki-yo-ki-yay!  I don’t think many other people left the office after paying taxes with such a smile as I did.  I don’t know if the Assessor is elected, but if so he has my vote for life!